Dredge Site Possibilities Considered

Virginia Looks To Maryland For Examples

The ports of Virginia and Maryland are fierce rivals for trade, but when it comes to dredging their shipping channels, they share a similar problem: their dump sites are filling up quickly.

In addition, increasing public awareness of environmental issues in both states has put port officials on the defensive, embroiling them in controversy as they seek new disposal sites.

Cost efficiency, once the primary consideration, must now share the spotlight with environmental concerns such as the preservation of wetlands, fish and wildlife habitats and water quality.

Dredged material from the Baltimore harbor is currently being dumped into Hart Miller Island, a manmade, diked peninsula not unlike Craney Island on the James River in Portsmouth.

Like Craney Island, which is expected to reach capacity in 1997, the Baltimore harbor dump site is almost at its limit.

Port officials in both states are now left with the mammoth decision of where to put millions of cubic yards of sludge that must be removed from shipping channels to make way for newer and bigger ships.

Maryland is already at work on an idea just springing up in Hampton Roads: using clean, dredged materials to restore and rebuild eroded islands in the Chesapeake Bay.

"This is one example of using dredged materials for environmentally beneficial purposes, instead of treating them like wastes to be disposed of," said John Gill, biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Annapolis.

The Virginia Port Authority and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers last month authorized a similar study that will cost $1.5 million and take about three years.

Gill, who has been working on the Maryland project for about a year, said he would most likely be involved in the Virginia study.

The Maryland project began by charting islands from the mouth of the Chester River, just north of Baltimore, southward to the Virginia border and comparing oceanographic maps from the early 1800s to current maps of the bay.

Gill soon discovered that of the 35 islands that existed in the 1800s, 12 had been lost completely to erosion. The remaining islands were also significantly smaller, having lost more than 10,500 acres to erosion.

"Most all of these eroded areas were wetlands," Gill said, "which led us to believe that maybe we can create new wetlands around the existing islands."

Further tests indicated that parts of the eroded islands now had hard clay bottoms and wouldn't support fishery habitats.

"That is important because we wouldn't want to trade fish for fowl," he said. "We wouldn't want to take underwater habitats and change them into something else."

Gill explained that islands are created gradually when a peninsula becomes bisected by a stream or creek and the shoreline begins to retreat. The natural process takes several hundred years.

But nature is being stymied and new islands are not being formed because people are living on the peninsulas and bulkheading their property, he continued.

"That made us ask why we couldn't use some of these clean dredged materials to create new wetlands, new wildlife habitats," Gill said. "Why not do something beneficial with the stuff instead of just trying to get rid of it?"

The biologist emphasized that some of the islands under consideration for restoration, such as Barren Island and Bodkin Island, are privately owned. The owners, he said, would have to agree to any dumping plans by the state.

Other islands, such as Eastern Neck Island and South Marsh Island, are owned by the Fish and Wildlife Service and used as national refuges. Bloodsworth Island is owned and used by the Navy as a bombing range.

The cost of restoring eroded islands in the Chesapeake Bay would be high, Gill said. "But there is a lot of public benefit in what we're looking at," he said, "particularly the habitat feeding of a lot of commercially important fish."

A draft proposal to create 1,000 acres of wetlands at Poplar Island is some indication of the expense, he said. The cost of bringing in stone to bulkhead the new wetlands would be $7 million, Gill said. That doesn't include money for engineering work, transportation of the sludge or building dikes.

"You have to remember that these islands are very valuable fish and wildlife habitats," Gill said. "They are isolated, have fewer predators and are home to some very important species like black ducks, bald eagles and ospreys."

A task force appointed earlier this year by Maryland Gov. William D. Schaefer is also investigating several other beneficial means of using spoils from the harbor dredging.

For example, clean sandy materials from the river could possibly be dumped in areas within Baltimore harbor to cap areas where the water is contaminated with pollutants, Gill said. Oyster grounds, covered up because of natural sand movement, could be re-established with dredged material. And the materials may even be useful for highway construction, he said.